Let's go back for a moment to that snippet which Dave Souza posted in that
new discussion thread at RfC/ID...
QUOTE(Dave Souza snippet)
The link is to an article "By Barry Kort", the second paragraph of which states –
"Last week, I learned firsthand why the content of Wikipedia articles are considered unreliable. Elsewhere, I wrote an essay on my experience trying to correct an erroneous article in Wikipedia. It was a dispiriting nightmare." The "Elsewhere" link is to a Moulton Lava essay.
Leaving aside for the moment the LaraLovely observation that Dave Souza now has the notable distinction of having just posted the only surviving
on-wiki concordance linking the avatar name "Moulton" to a real name from academia, it's instructive to dig down to the next level of detail.
The
Op-Ed article that Dave cites on the
HardNewsCafe (HNC) at Utah State University (USU) originally appeared a few days earlier as a
post bylined by "Moulton" on the Media Ethics blog associated the school's undergraduate course on Journalism in Ethics. The headline of that Moultonic blog post was, "Wikipedia and Ethics in Online Journalism." A few days after it appeared, Mike Sweeney, the Department Head of the USU School of Journalism and Communication, who is also the Senior Faculty Editor of the
award-winning HardNewsCafe offered to reprint the blog post as an Op-Ed piece...
QUOTE(E-Mail from Mike Sweeney)
Subject: RE: Wikipedia: A Case Study In Accuracy, Excellence, and Ethics in Online Media
Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 13:47:30 -0600
From: "Mike Sweeney" <mike.sweeney@usu.edu>
To: "Barry Kort" <bkort@media.mit.edu>
I would love to post this as an opinion piece on the HNC.
Any changes you want to make before I do? It appears that the word "of" has fallen out of the lead paragraph. ..Mike
When Mike Sweeney reprinted it, he fixed the above-noted typo, and he made two other changes that he didn't bother to notify me of in advance. First he pitched my bland headline and substituted one that he crafted from the very sentence that Dave Souza highlights, "Wikipedia makes for a nightmare in online journalism ethics." I have to admit it's a better headline than the one I used on the Media Ethics blog. And Mike's other change was to replace the byline "Moulton" with the real name of an
academic who is affiliated with USU, in accordance with the policy of the HardNewsCafe that all published articles are bylined with the author's real name.